The adoption of personal wireless communications devices has been rapid and revolutionary. Today there are more mobile users than internet users worldwide because of the desire for immediate communications methods and wide availability and instant access to telecommunications networks. Aside from voice services, other services for communication and data transfer have seen wide adoption, such as: SMS, MMS, WAP, and IM. In particular, SMS as a communications method has seen the greatest adoption because of its strengths as a communications tool, cost savings against voice, inclusion in basic voice service plans, and wide device compatibility.
Worldwide, SMS has seen greater adoption than in the United States. This is due in part to the relative cheapness of voice service plans in the U.S. compared to other countries, the availability of flat-rate voice plans, and American's voice-centric communications behavior. In November 2001, wireless service providers began to connect their networks for text messaging, allowing subscribers on different networks to exchange text messages. The phenomenon of text messaging had caught on in Europe and Asia a few years earlier, but the U.S. had many unique challenges in combining networks running different technologies (CDMA, TDMA, GSM, iDEN) to enable truly open text messaging across all networks. Since the groundbreaking launch of AT&T Wireless' inter-carrier text messaging program in November 2001, followed by a CTIA-led interoperability consortium including national carriers and others early in 2002, the number of text messages in the United States has grown astronomically to over twenty (20) billion messages sent every month.
SMS traffic in the U.S., especially among younger users has seen dramatic growth. In reaction to the wide adoption of SMS among the highly sought after 18-34 year old demographic, marketers are beginning to use the platform for marketing purposes. The one-to-one nature of advertising on a personal wireless device as well as the instant nature of SMS messages makes for an attractive marketing method. However, due to the opt-in nature of SMS marketing, the process of promoting a mobile campaign to generate exposure still requires considerable resources. Often, costly traditional methods of advertising such as TV, radio, and print are the means of promoting mobile campaigns. These methods are inefficient because they are not targeted specifically to a mobile savvy audience.
Aside from pure mobile marketing campaigns, the growing popularity of this communications method has led to the formation of new SMS services that provide free information and content to mobile users. These services provide updated information via SMS such as weather alerts, real-time stock quotes, sports scores, and other content. As well, other services are enabling mobile social networking services through group messaging services via SMS. These services are focused providing a free service or content to grow their user base. And, similar to internet websites, these large user bases can support their free services through advertising. Often many outgoing messages sent by these SMS services contain unused character space. Some have begun to sell this space to advertiser directly, but most SMS services prefer to focus on building their user base rather than build a sales team. An opportunity exists for an aggregator to focus on acquiring advertisers and provide advertisements to append to the outgoing messages of third-party SMS services. In return, the SMS services earn a commission based on the advertisements that are sent. Likewise, advertisers who want to reach a mobile audience, do not need to form a relationship with one or many SMS services to place their mobile ads. Instead these advertisers can turn to a single aggregator to create the mobile advertisements and optimize the placement of such advertisements across all third-party SMS message providers. This concept has been successful on the internet and is commonly described as an “ad network”.
One desirable feature is for advertisements messages to be provided to third-party SMS services in an automated fashion through an API integration between an ad server and an SMS message application of the third-party SMS service. Advertisements are served to the SMS service provider only when specific targeting criteria are satisfied. This criteria is based on area code of the mobile phone number for SMS delivery, the time of day, and the content category code assigned to the SMS service provider. By providing this information to the ad server, along with the content of the outgoing message, the ad server can provide an advertisement that fits within the space requirements of a standard 160 character SMS message as well as one that meets the advertisers targeting preferences.